Mike Fleming

I'm curious what that means. What is the opposite of man exploiting man? Sorry for the OT, I'll try to keep it brief.

Government has every incentive to encourage baby-making. How else will they get the young to pay for the old? And if they can't pay the old, how will they retain their loyalty and support for the system as a whole? If people get taxed, but then the government were to say, "oh, we can't afford to pay for you in old age", how would that go down with people? The grand tradition of everyone having as many babies as possible, in order to keep society going in centuries past, provides cover for the government's behaviour.

This reminds me of the time I went to see a bull fight in Spain. That is torture in my opinion. For anyone who doesn't know they continually wound the bull until it is on death's door without killing it. Only at the very end do they put it out of it's misery. To kill an animal as fast as possible in order to obtain the food from it is not the same thing. That doesn't mean I condone all the practices in the meat industry, but I think killing animals for food, and torturing animals are 2 different things.

The free market uses drones to deliver goods to people. The government uses them for killing.

Using your real name lends a certain amount of authenticity I think. I personally react better to those who use their names, than those who have pseudonyms or whatever. I don't know if it's entirely fair to think that way but that's what I feel and I think many others do too.

My sense of the conversation, particularly towards the end was that you were trying to bully Stefan into accepting your point of view. You were attempting to denigrate him and make him doubt himself rather than put forward an actual argument. I'm familiar with this technique because I've had it done to me and also done it myself to others in the past. It's not uncommon in society and seems to be almost regarded in our sick culture as a legitimate means of resolving disputes. But in reality, it is just might makes right. It is one person attempting to dominate another and I'm not surprised that Stef hung up on you. It's the only way to respond to that behaviour. Like a previous poster mentioned, you probably had an insecure parent or parents who always had to be right in order to make themselves not feel so bad. If they had to be always right, then you had to be always wrong and that means the above technique would have been used on you consistently. It wasn't any more valid when they did it you , than when you do it to others. It's something that needs to be unlearned otherwise you just fall into the same cycle that they did and will lead a similar life. Is that what you want? To be like your parents?

Well, religious books have a history of being popular so it should make some good money.

Wealthier communities must by definition have strong property rights. Otherwise there is no reason why the community as a whole would be wealthy if there is an ability to steal from people. You can certainly have wealthy people in a community without strong property rights, but the community as a whole is very unlikely to be wealthy. And that disparity in wealth leads to all kinds of social frictions which usually get blamed on "cultural differences". It's funny how people can get along when people are getting what they need and want. It's like, for example, when you have a free market, it is not a good idea to discriminate against people because your competitors who don't discriminate will do better than you by having a larger customer base. And then you get to talk to and interact with people from different cultures and you find out they aren't really that different at all. They have the same needs, many of the same desires, etc. We are all human. So-called culture is really just a way to divide people.

Wow, interesting discussion. I just wanted to put my own personal perspective on this. I've talked in the forum before how I come from a family with a sadistic, bullying, psychologically abusive mother. When you are in this situation, you tend to be surrounded in the family circle of friends by similar people. Not to mention you yourself, are likely to be a victim of bullying or a bully yourself and this affects the friendships you have. Also, TV doesn't help in this regard. By the time I got to my adult years, it was basically the only way I knew how to be. But what happened with me, as I started to move into the wider world, I realised something was wrong with my own behaviour as I struggled to connect with people and have relationships. I struggled for a long time trying to make sense of anything. I feel like what eventually set me down the road to self-knowledge, the one point in my life that I could identify, was when I met a person at work who was quite happy, someone who didn't feel the need to attack others and all that kind of thing. And basically I decided I wanted to be more like that and so started finding out more about him, getting to know him better, observing him. That then led me to searching on the internet more and more and gradually I was able to reason myself away from bad behaviour. The interesting thing is I didn't come across that person until my mid-20's. But I knew something was wrong around 18 or so and was basically just stumbling along until my mid-20's. So from my perspective, people who are abused, probably realise something is wrong early on, but may not know what to do about it and may just keep going because "it's all they know". Maybe they don't reach a point where they have the fork in the road or maybe it comes later in life. I'm not making excuses for abusers. I, myself, have very little sympathy for my mother. My feeling is that at some point people get an opportunity to change and it shows the true character of the person at that point. In that respect, my mother has come up short. The lies, emotional blackmail, guilt etc just continue regardless. Hopefully, I'm articulating this well enough that people get the point I'm trying to make. I think abusive people deep down know that their behaviour is bad and at some point have an opportunity to change it. Unfortunately, there is plenty of things in society, and especially on TV, that basically makes excuses for bad behaviour and gives these people a chance to make excuses rather than changes. EDIT: just re-reading this, I wanted to emphasize one of the points about my situation is that I didn't realise my mother was abusive until my late 20's. I just thought that's how mothers were. I think if you fail to recognise it in your parents then you are almost doomed to repeat it.

I don't know whether you, personally, can change yourself or not. I didn't come from such a bad situation. There was very little actual physical abuse, it was mostly psychological bullying abuse and being made to feel worthless. Being attacked any time you made a mistake, that kind of thing. Even that ruined me for relationships in my 20's and it was a long hard road over many years to try and change my own behaviour so I wouldn't end up repeating my parents mistakes. The one thing I always had in my mind was that I would rather be single for the rest of my life than end up like my father, living with someone who who would abuse me. Or vice versa. I still have a heightened fight or flight response that I have to manage. It's like my body is always expecting someone to attack, verbally, at any moment but over time it is becoming more manageable. I still have my moments though, and still sometimes on forums where I'll misconstrue someone's argument as an attack on me and retaliate. I believe the cycle can be broken and I believe I have done it. But it's not easy and the older you are when you start the more difficult it becomes.

I think it's brave for anyone to put there ideas out there, but when they don't respond to what I see as valid criticisms and charge on regardless that's when they start to become less than admirable in my eyes.

Violation of property rights leads to social problems. Is that the part you are struggling with? Or that people look for scapegoats for social problems rather than addressing the core issues?

I've been to the Vatican, and really, it doesn't look like there was much wealth sharing going on when that place was established. In fact, compare all the grand cathedrals that were built throughout history and compare to the average person's living standards when they were made. Not to mention I think the Vatican have a sizable stash in their own bank. Oh, and religion's don't pay tax as far as I know. Do as I say...

When you say lack of shared values though, what exactly does that mean? Lets say people had the shared value that property rights could not be violated (thereby invalidating taxation, war, etc). I think that would lead to social cohesion. Unfortunately, this doesn't exist anywhere (to my knowledge) and in my opinion the resulting problems from property right violations get blamed on Jews, illegal immigrants, multiculturalism, etc which then leads to a further disintegration as people start to form cliques for protection. Culture is pretty meaningless imo. I think it is used by people to invalidate people who are different to them.

The occupy movement has always been about wealth redistribution imo. It's ironic, because what they complain about with the banks is wealth redistribution via the Fed, bailouts and such. Their solution is not to say that wealth redistribution is wrong, that it is stealing. Rather, they say they want their cut of the loot, even advocating more stealing to make sure they get it. Which makes them no better fundamentally.

Everything that is you came from the external environment and "built you". Therefore, every aspect of you has been determined by external factors. From everything that makes up your physical body to all the information stored in your mind. It's all from the external environment. This sounds like the "prove that God doesn't exist argument" to me. Especially when you talk about an infinitely powerful force controlling the universe. We don't have enough information to predict human behaviour down to a fine-grained level. The same with the environment in general. We have approximations, physics equations that are very accurate on objects as whole, but there is never a case where we have a complete set of information. The weather is a good example of this. It can be predicted only to a degree and once you get more than a few days out it becomes impossible. When Stef talks about abuse creating violent and abusive people, that is determinism. We can do that because it's at a higher level. Trying to predict what someone will decide to have for lunch 2 days from now, in comparison, is obviously virtually impossible. Not enough information. Or a better way of saying this is that we know that abuse leads to these kinds of things, but we don't know on exactly which day/s in particular that the person is going to be abusive. Just that they will unless they are treated. That's just silly. I define it the way it is generally defined. I don't like going with different interpretations because that's where I think Stef trips up on this subject. You can't have your own definitions because then everyone goes round in circles. We think we have choices but in reality they are illusions. The choices we make we're those we were always going to make. I've seen the videos and the debates and I think that he has a problem with determinism because he sees it as taking away people's responsibility and moral agency. What happens is what was always going to happen. While I think it's true that our choices are pre-determined, I don't believe that takes away responsibility and moral agency. I think it's more complex than that. We obviously can't just say what happens happens, because then anybody would be able to get away with any crime by just saying "it wasn't my fault". I think that's one of the reasons why it is still being debated because no-one quite knows what to do with it at this point. Including me. But I'm not going to deny determinism just because it's inconvenient to me. It just needs to be thought out. Being a determinist, if nothing else, gives you a much better and clearer understanding of the world.

Can we make the assumption that there was point in time in the universe when there was no life? I think this is a fair assumption to make. I think everyone can agree that at this point in time everything was deterministic, cause-and effect (maybe with some random quantum effects thrown in, I'm not a physicist so don't know exactly how that works). So the creation of life itself was deterministic. It was caused by previous events. If life itself is purely physical, being a part of the universe, then it would be following the causal chain of events. How does free will get into this equation? Just because something is really complex, like our brains, doesn't mean there is some magic behind it. There will likely be some point where we build robots and they will have quite complex interactions with the world and seem "alive" to us. The things they say probably won't be able to be predicted from the outside (hell computers today aren't all that predictable), but their behaviour will be determined by their initial programming and the environment hey are in. Humans are no different we are just constructed from different materials. We are self-replicating machines. I think people who advocate free will do so because they think the consequences of determinism are that no-one is responsible for their actions, but it's much more complex than that since we are a part of this environment. It's not a closed system that we are observing from the outside. You have to look at the science first and figure out the way forward from there, not look at potential consequences and then go backwards. A discussion of the consequences of determinism would be very valuable I think. It's something that I have been thinking about for a long time but still not come to satisfactory conclusions. Why do people jump off buildings? Why do people do any number of crazy things? Either they were born with faulty brains or their experiences drove them this way. Abuse changes people's brain patterns and gets them to do things not always in their best interest. It's talked about all the time here at FDR.

I was listening to a Stef Sunday show recently where he started to talking about people being abused and the body thinking it was going to die young and so not knowing where to go once it hits middle age. This was then linked to the idea of the mid-life crisis. Does anyone else have any thoughts about this? I haven't thought about it a lot but straight away it rings true to me. I hit my early 30's and just knew that drastic changes had to be made. I think I knew it in my 20's but the urgency wasn't there. I genuinely thought I had forever to solve the problems that I knew were there when I was in my 20's. It wasn't the "buy a sports car" mid-life crisis but is it basically the same thing and the guys who buy the sports cars are just trying to deal with abusive pasts in a totally non-philosophical way? Did Stef buy a sports car?

Once bad behaviour is pointed out to someone, assuming they are not a psychopath, they then have a choice to continue on the way they are in the full knowledge that they are not behaving well, or attempt to change their behaviour. Sorry, if you've pointed this out, your post was bit tldr, but I tried to get the gist of it. I agree that we don't have to be compassionate towards abusive people. For me, people get at least one chance with me, sometimes more than one depending on how they are and what they say. Generally, not always, but generally, if someone is at least somewhat articulate in their thoughts I am willing to give them quite a few chances. I try not to take things personally on message boards, but in real life, I generally see no need to be particularly compassionate to really abusive people or those who show no willingness to change their behaviour. If they seem beyond hope, my usual strategy, both on the boards and in real life, is to disengage.

Wow. A politician quoting Rothbard. Never thought I'd see that day. (Ron Paul excepted) I thought these guys, (UKIP) were more right-wing conservative. Maybe they are moving to the libertarian side. He was a bit firebrand at the end, but it's all good.

I agree. I think the system basically just took as much of his money as it could get and then set him loose with barely a thought. The system is, if not directly designed for abuse, certainly has evolved into a very abusive system. But I guess that's what happens when you get one group of people with a monopoly on law and order with the ability to take people's money to pay for it regardless if people think they are getting a good service or not. Why put much effort into serving the needs of your customers when they are forced to pay anyway? As for the black/white thing, looking back on the OJ thing, I can certainly understand the reaction of many black people at the time. I don't think overlooking guilt or innocence is a good thing though. I think the facts as they exist should always be paramount in people's minds, though I acknowledge in this system that that can be very hard for people to do when justice is so skewed. I guess while ever the system at least appears to serve the needs of the white majority they won't feel a need to make a stink about it for the most part and it's left to the minority of whites, like myself, to point out why it is an incredibly unjust system and can't be fixed imo other than to allow competition to the govt in the area of law and order. While ever the incentives exist for it to be abused, it will be abused. But government is nothing if it isn't a monopoly on law and order.

Hmmm, interesting. I've started to write a few times but then deleted it, it's hard to properly articulate my thoughts on this. The court of public opinion. In an anarchist society, where it is likely the law will be more fair, just and even-handed, people may not feel like an injustice was done so much because it is likely that the vast majority of crime situations would seen to be handled fairly. This is completely unlike the current situation, where there are countless innocent people in jail, countless people who have not hurt or stolen anything from anyone and we have people who regularly commit what most would consider crimes yet receive no sanction for it. Was all the uproar about this case just symptoms of people frustrated with a deeply flawed and unjust system? Would there be the same level of uproar in an anarchistic justice system? It seems to me that he was innocent of what he was charged. But, yes, it does seem he is scarred from other, most likely, childhood experiences and this was maybe a trigger that brought him to an edge that he may have been skirting his whole life. I don't know, it's just speculation. But I'm very reluctant to say that the court of public opinion was right and the justice system wrong in this case. It seems like there are a lot of complex, interacting factors at work here and trying to unravel them all and draw some meaningful conclusions from it is like trying to unravel the proverbial Gordian knot. I just don't think we have enough information at hand to do so.

Let him say that. He can rant and rave for awhile, but after a day or two he'll probably get bored with the idea and decide he needs some food and water. And would also like to buy things from people in the community. He will probably be a bit more willing to follow generally accepted practices at that point. Either that or the community will just get fed up with his behaviour and put him in a strait jacket.

"Remembered previous lives"? Really? They've actually attached some person to a real life person that lived before and proved without a doubt that that person could not have known any other way? And they've described the physical process of transmission of consciousness? Or at least theorised how it might happen? Or is it just woo-woo? Using pseudo-science to try to prove ancient tradition? If reincarnation was proven it would be revolutionary and news everywhere, and yet, I'm not hearing anything...